Assessing Child-rearing Behaviors: A Comparison of Ratings Made by Mother, Father, Child, and Sibling on the CRPBI

Abstract

This study of the reliability and validity of scales from the Child's Report of Parental Behavior (CRPBI) presents data on the utility of aggregating the ratings of multiple observers. Subjects were 680 individuals from 170 families. The participants in each family were a college freshman student, the mother, the father, and 1 sibling. The results revealed moderate internal consistency (M = .71) for all rater types on the 18 subscales of the CRPBI, but low interrater agreement (M = .30). The same factor structure was observed across the 4 rater types; however, aggregation within raters across salient scales to form estimated factor scores did not improve rater convergence appreciably (M = .36). Aggregation of factor scores across 2 raters yields much higher convergence (M = .51), and the 4-rater aggregates yielded impressive generalizability coefficients (M = .69). These and other analyses suggested that the responses of each family member contained a small proportion of true variance and a substantial proportion of factor-specific systematic error. The latter can be greatly reduced by aggregating scores across multiple raters.

Over-Time Changes in Adjustment and Competence among Adolescents from Authoritative, Authoritarian, Indulgent, and Neglectful Families

“…Although we recognize that youngsters' reports of their parents' behavior may be colored by a variety of factors, we do not believe that "objective" assessments of family processes (derived in most studies by observing families in contrived and unfamiliar situations in university laboratories) or parental reports provide an inherently superior means of assessing family relationships. Indeed, the few studies that have correlated "objective" assessments of family life with both adolescents' reports of their parents' behavior and with their parents' reports suggest that adolescents, not parents, are more accurate (e.g., Schwartz, Barton-Henry, & Pruzinsky, 1985). Perhaps more important, our willingness to use adolescents' reports permits us to study a more representative sample than would be the case if parents' participation in the study were required.…”

Childrearing Style of Anxiety-Disordered Parents

“…In line with research on multiple-informants and childrearing [51,52], we aggregated ratings in an attempt to assess the childrearing style of each parent with greater validity. When reports on parenting were available for two children in the same family, the mean of the scores was used in the data analysis.…”

The Intergenerational Transmission of Perfectionism: Parents' Psychological Control as an Intervening Variable.

“…This approach allowed us to circumvent the difficulties associated with the method variance problem (Schwarz, Barton-Henry, & Pruzinsky, 1985;Simons, Whitbeck, Conger, & Chyi-In, 1991). This problem refers to the fact that when two variables are measured using reports from a single source, associations between the variables may be inflated because of the individual's characteristic response tendencies.…”